Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, companies utilizing e-commerce websites often do not have a physical store or location where a salesperson can help both novice and knowledgeable customers find sought-after products. Instead, a customer navigating an e-commerce website typically attempts to identify a product that meets the customer's needs. Even a customer with considerable experience navigating e-commerce websites sometimes experiences difficulty in locating a desired product from among hundreds or thousands of offered products. For novice customers, meanwhile, the task of shopping online via the web can be unproductive and even frustrating.
In response to these difficulties, these companies continually strive to make their e-commerce websites more dynamic, compelling, and easier for users to navigate and locate products. To help meet these goals, one recent innovation allows customers to search for a product by tags associated with that product. Tags essentially enable customers, the e-commerce company, or some other entity the ability to easily categorize products. For instance, a customer who has purchased a certain hiking-related book may tag this book as relating to “hiking”. When other customers then conduct a future tag search based on “hiking”, this book will appear in a returned listing of products.
To further the usefulness of these tags, companies utilizing e-commerce websites strive to increase “tag concordance”. That is, these companies desire to strengthen an association between a product and certain tags already associated with that product and whose association appears to be particularly good. In addition to increasing concordance, these companies also strive to increase tag coverage. That is, these companies desire to increase tagging of products that have none or very few associated tags.
Accordingly, among other potential improvements, there remains a need for improving tag concordance and tag coverage for products and other elements on an e-commerce website.